Michael Andersen:  Thanks for the invitation.

Kol Peterson:  I'm just gonna start by having you say a few more words about yourself that are not covered by your bio, that you would like for people to know about you. You've done a lot of things over the years that are relevant to the questions we'll be talking about today is so  provide a little context for things about you that we should know.

Michael Andersen: Sure. I, I became obsessed with housing policy and transportation sort of in tandem. When I was a reporter in suburban Portland covering Clark county, Washington I was covering county government and like two parts of county government are covering poor people who are interacting with the criminal justice system and covering rich people who are building new homes or even middle class people who are building new homes on the fringe of the urban landscape.

And I was seeing all these poor people, but get being screwed by the fact that they were being forced to live in [00:03:00 ] places without that we're not designed for people without cars. And then they would own a car, but it'd be a crappy car. And then their car would fall apart. Then their life would fall apart.

And I was like, there's got to be better. Our solution. Meanwhile, I was spending time with all my 20 something, friends in Portland who didn't have cars and they didn't care. Like, and so I was like, it's not as simple a story as that. Like there's a lot of privileges both ways, but that was sort of what got me thinking about transportation and housing.

So since I've been working on public transportation, journalism and biking journalism, and since more recently housing advocacy, I've been sort of  doing content in various ways.

Kol Peterson: So tell us a little bit about your own family's experience, living in an ADU.

Michael Andersen: Yeah.  It started with just trying to continue to live with our housemates.

So I was interested in living with housemates when I started a little business 10 years ago because I was new, I was going to be socially isolated otherwise, and I needed to save money it worked in both dimensions. And then my wife moved in and then  our housemates had a kid and then we were going to have a kid.

We [00:04:00 ] were like, this is too much for this 1942 building. And we're gonna have to figure out some way to do it. And we decided that best way was for us to keep them whole while they built an ADU. And so we lived as tenants for several years. And it was great. It was a perfect setup for both of our kids to grow up together as best friends and the they had to move for a job recently.

So we've relocated since, but it was a really rewarding thing.

Kol Peterson: All right, so you have some direct personal experience with ADUs  in particular, and we're going to talk about ADUs for sure, but we're also going to focus on this broader conversation of middle  housing today. So let's start off with talking about Sightline Institute first. Tell us a little bit about what Sightline Institute is and  what's the mission of Sightline Institute? How would you describe it to other people for those who are not familiar with it?

Michael Andersen: Sure. We're a sustainability think tank founded in 1993 based in Seattle, but covering the Pacific Northwest.

So my, my boss's big idea is that you can't get people to care about their planet. The evidence seems to suggest, but maybe you can get people to care about their [00:05:00 ] ecosystem. And so we focus on the Pacific Northwest as an ecosystem across the border states and nations, and write about the ways that we can make it the best, most welcoming, most sustainable version of itself as a model to other ecosystems.

Kol Peterson: Is there any other examples of similar Sightline Institute types of think tanks out there in other regions or comparable institutions that you can think of in the United States.

Michael Andersen: We're definitely weird, but Rocky Mountain Institute is a little bit similar. There are a lot bigger now founded in Colorado, I think.

And there's my my colleague Eric is trying to working on creating one for Appalachian actually. So there may be more.

Kol Peterson:  Cool. All right. So how tell us about the scope of the material that you cover for the  Sightline Institute.

Michael Andersen: I write mostly about housing, a little bit about transportation and that overlap, which is parking, which I love talking about parking, in the Portland and Oregon areas.

So mostly focusing on the statewide level and regional level and what we can do there, but also a little bit of Portland stuff to the extent that it's [00:06:00 ] like a model for other cities.

Kol Peterson: And how does the material that you cover for  Sightline Institute fit into the institutes larger mission?

Michael Andersen: I think one of our niches is that we are a sort of environmental organization that is really into economics and harnessing the power and insights of economics for our progressive sustainability sort of vision.

And one of our insights, or one of our decisions, our perspective is that  we desperately need to reduce the need for energy over the longterm without making it feel like we're giving anything up. And the way to do that is to allow urbanization, but we've banned urbanization because of zoning laws that have made it impossible for people to basically choose where they want to live, which is good for lots of reasons.

So we try to work to undo that while also not being blind to the other complications that creates for disruption and so on.

Kol Peterson: You previously wrote for a bike blog, local [00:07:00 ] bike blog. That's quite beloved, quite popular called Bike Portland. Can you talk about the material that you wrote for Bike Portland and how it relates to what you covered at the Sightline Institute?

Michael Andersen: Yeah. So when I came to Bike Portland, it was just 2013. Portland was sort of swinging into a big boom in home building was coming out of a four year, like plateau, like almost no home building. So like there was, it was obvious that there was going to be some sort of a rent crisis. We already had a rent shortage and then the rents were starting to climb.

And I was really interested in like, we should be solving this problem, but we should be solving it in a way that makes things more proximal. Like if you look at the greatest biking cities in Southeast Asia or Northern Europe, they're all full of these little close together homes. And that's the bedrock.

People are not biking that many miles, they're just biking a lot because there are a lot of short trips. And the only way we create short trips is by building ADUs  and attached homes and apartment buildings that are all close to jobs and everything [00:08:00 ] else. So that was the case I was making. And I had a weekly column about that and got more and more obsessed with sort of that side of how to improve biking and  by living in the places where biking is already good.

Instead of having to spend all our wheels, trying to make biking great in more and more places, which we should be doing both of.

Kol Peterson:  This is off topic, but in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and I would imagine Europe electric, motor scooters are becoming more common, right? That's not really taking off in the US.

I mean, those little like ride on hop on scooters are really taking off, but not like the kind of ride on scooters that give you longer distances. And they're electric. What are your thoughts about electric scooters and their potential. Are those as good as bikes or what are the differences? What are the ways in which like electric scooters are?

Provided serving the same role that bikes could play. And how does that deal? How do you think about that in terms of urban form? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't really have a strong perspective, I guess. But they're better than cars. They're worse [00:09:00 ] than bikes. Bikes are better than scooters and worse than skateboards.

Michael Andersen: So yeah, I mean, I think it's like if a, if a tool is going to work, you should be able to use it. I'm pro transportation to the extent that it infringes on the other ty